Robert Ryan

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2024

Stories (2)

2 Stories

35 karma pts

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“Quod Facis, Bene Fac” by Robert Ryan

Submitted to Contest #266

Okay. So I’m this 5th grader who has no idea what he wants to be when he grows up. Not bad. My parents had very little education. They’re in the working class. But they consider true class to be shown by your integrity, not what you do for a living. They brought me up to value good character above everything else.But it’s not that my parents are contemptuous of the upper classes. They still consider getting a good education to be the road to a better life, including a prosperous career. It’s just that they only consider you to be a good pers...

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“Zsido's Obsession” by Robert Ryan

Submitted to Contest #263

Kathy joined Jen in the university cafeteria. Usually only students ate there. It was unusual to see a faculty member. But Dr. Zsido had just arrived and took a seat just close enough to overhear the students' conversation. He was a historian. He always felt that the "hard scientists" at the university acted superior to professors in the humanities. Especially that artificial intelligence guy, Mangieri, and his protege, Curtis Allen. Zsido knew that one of the girls at the nearby table was in one of Dr. Allen's classes. He had already heard ...

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Author bio

I'm a retired Cognitive Psychologist. I'm not a shrink, but rather an academic psychologist. That is I'm engaged in research and teaching, not therapy. Cognitive psychology studies mental processes such as attention, pattern recognition, perception, concept formation, judgment and decision making, language comprehension, and problem solving. It even ventures into the nature of consciousness. That's what I'm especially interested in. We use an information processing framework inspired by the development of computers. As such, cognitive psychology interfaces with information science and artificial intelligence. But it is also closely related to neuroscience, which studies the brain. The question I'm most interested in is how to develop synthetic consciousness in man-made systems and what that would mean for humanity.